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Story 03 February 2023
Public

News: European Commission launches the European Cancer Imaging Initiative

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Mariana Marques

The European Commission just launched, on 23 January 2023, the European Cancer Imaging Initiative to support healthcare providers, research institutes and innovators in making the best use of innovative data-driven solutions for cancer treatment and care. 

 

The initiative, a flagship action under Europe's Beating Cancer Plan, will work towards creating a digital infrastructure linking up resources and databases of cancer imaging data across the EU, while ensuring adherence to high ethics standards, trust, security and protection of personal data. It will also connect EU-level and national initiatives, hospital networks, as well as research repositories with imaging data and other relevant health data.

The European Cancer Imaging Initiative intends to create a trusted framework for researchers, innovators, doctors, and patients, based on technological innovation that is combined with data protection. Thanks to the new European Cancer Imaging Initiative, researchers will have efficient access to more high-quality data to study and advance our understanding of the disease, and innovators will be able to develop and test data-driven solutions for cancer care. 

The facilitation of the development of data-driven solutions will allow doctors to make more precise and faster clinical decisions, diagnostics, treatments and predictive medicine, for the benefit of cancer patients. Furthermore, it will support data altruism from citizens, who could give their consent or permission voluntarily to make available data that they generate, as a way of enriching the health datasets.

Following the European Cancer Imaging Initiative’s launch, it is expected that by December 2023 the design of the pan-European digital infrastructure will have been completed and the collaboration mechanisms will have been established. Data providers will then be able to connect with this new European federated platform. The first version of the platform will be released by the end of 2024 and the final release is expected by the end of 2025, with the digital infrastructure fully operational and running in 2026.

 

To know more, please read the official press release here: Europe's Beating Cancer Plan: Launch of the European Cancer Imaging Initiative

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